1. Technical Field
The present disclosure is generally related to billing for scanning costs, and, in particular, to a system and method of billing for scanning service costs by examining and weighting the content of pages that are scanned.
2. Description of Related Art
In order to scan a document at a specific cost or file size, users today have to make several imaging and quality selections in order to reach the desired price or file size. Users generally have to use a trial and error process working through multiple tabs to adjust the scan settings to reach the desired price or file size. Manual scan controls which affect file size, and thus cost, include, but are not limited to, image options, image enhancements, file formats, scan presets, quality and resolution. A user can reduce the file size of a scan by manually altering color, original type, subtype selection, saturation, lighter/darker contrast, and auto background suppression selections.
The difficult trial and error process of adjusting multiple scan controls in order to reach a desired cost or file size has lead to charging for scanning based upon printing/copying modes, i.e. the user may choose either a black and white or a color scan. This approach involves charging a “per click” fee of a fixed amount when a user scans a black and white page, and charging a different amount for the “per click” fee when scanning a color page. This is referred to as the “one size fits all billing approach” and is simply billing one fee for scanned black and white pages and another fee for scanned color pages, regardless of the content in the scanned page. For example, the “per click” fee may be $0.01 (U.S) per black and white printed page and $0.08 (U.S.) per color printed page.
Another approach is to determine the cost of the scan based upon the activity of a scanning device or output hardware. U.S. Pat. No. 6,112,039 discloses a billing-for-scanning system which includes an audit system for determining how much credit a particular user has to expend on a particular function. For example, if a user requests fifty scans or prints, the audit system will, before processing each image, determine if the particular user has enough credit to pay for the output image. The pricing of a particular job may be determined by the counts of activities of the scanner or output hardware.
The prior art does not generally take into account the objects that are in the page or how those objects are distributed in the page. For example, there are several types of black and white and/or color objects that may be on any page. Some of the types of objects are: monochrome contone objects, color contone objects, monochrome text objects, color text objects, monochrome line art objects, color line art objects, monochrome graphic objects, color graphic objects, monochrome low frequency halftone objects, color low frequency halftone objects, monochrome high frequency halftone objects, color high frequency halftone objects, monochrome solid fill objects, and color solid fill objects. The service cost of scanning pages is a function of these object types scanned on a machine since its last service. For example, the service cost for scanning color solid fill objects will be higher than printing monochrome text objects. The presence or absence of these objects affects the file size of a scan and thus the service cost of scanning pages.